Michael Weiss is the Research Director of The Henry Jackson Society, a foreign policy think tank, as well as the co-chair of its Russia Studies Centre. A native New Yorker, he has written widely on English and Russian literature, American culture, Soviet history and the Middle East. Follow @michaeldweiss

Is the US restraining Turkey from military action in Syria?

What’s going on between Turkey and the United States with respect to Syria? In the last fortnight:

• An unarmed Vietnam-era Turkish reconnaissance plane performing a military exercise was shot out of the sky by Syrian air defences. Turkey insisted that the plane, after having briefly and accidentally dipped into Syrian airspace, was downed in international skies, about 13 nautical miles off the Syrian coast, by an anti-aircraft missile. Damascus said the plane was in Syrian airspace and gunned down by machine-gun fire which can only reach a shore-hugging 1.5 miles. The rescue plane sent to look for the two missing F-4 pilots was also allegedly fired upon.

• Turkey invoked Article IV of the Nato charter and turned up at the resulting meeting a few days later asking the alliance to draw up no-fly zone contingency plans, a request which surprised other Nato members. Nato condemned Syria but took no further action and, for the umpteenth time in the last year and a half, Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen disavowed any desire for military intervention in Syria, while Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey praised Turkey’s “measured” response to the incident.

• The Turkish prime minister’s chief foreign policy advisor announced that Ankara’s rules of engagement had been altered and “expanded” in the wake of the downed aircraft incident. The government wasted no time in demonstrating how this was so.

• Turkey deployed two armored brigades and anti-aircraft batteries to several positions along its 565-mile border with Syria, with three stations established in Hatay, the province where most of the 34,000 Syrian refugees are now being housed, including the military defectors known as the Free Syrian Army.

• On Sunday, Turkish F-16s were scrambled three times to chase away MI-8 and MI-17 Russian-made assault transport helicopters which had approached within about 4 miles of the Syrian-Turkish border, thus creating a de facto no-fly zone within Syrian territory. F-16s have since been scrambled twice more.

• TheWall Street Journal published a piece on Saturday quoting unnamed US intelligence officials who confirmed Damascus’s side in the downed plane incident, saying that the F4 was shot down in Syrian air space. “We see no indication that it was shot down by a surface-to-air missile,” one anonymous source told WSJ. A former US official with ties to Ankara said, “You think that the airplane was there by mistake?", suggesting Turkey dispatched it to test Syria’s air defence systems.

• The Turkish media went bonkers over the WSJ story. Turkish PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan fulminated during a public event, “Who are these sources? [WSJ] have published lies before.” He blamed the paper's anti-Obama “bias” for running the story and accused Turkish journalists of recycling it of being "merciless and reckless". State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland today "condemn[ed]" the leak, saying the US firmly backs its ally.

• The Sunday Timesran an exclusive this weekend, this one quoting unnamed Turkish diplomats who said that Russia had a hand in downing the F-4 and that Russian technicians may have even assisted the Syrian Air Force. One diplomat suggested that it was a warning to NATO: “Syria is not Libya, and any attempt to impose a ‘no-fly zone’ over Syria will face one of the most formidable air defences on Earth, and will cost any attacker dearly.” In a rather unusual point of agreement, an Israeli Air Force source backed up the Turkish diplomat’s allegation. Also, The Sunday Times largely reaffirmed the “official” Turkish account of the incident.

It would appear that Ankara is seeking to justify some form of military response or engagement with Damascus, and is being restrained from doing so by the United States. This conforms to the conventional wisdom that President Obama will not stop outwardly seeking a diplomatic solution to the Syria crisis until after the election in November.

Let’s assume Erdogan is telling the truth and the F-4 was in international airspace when it was shot down. Turkey would be within its rights to respond, and it would therefore be likely that someone in the Obama administration would leak a story to a mainstream broadsheet not typically friendly to either the American or Turkish administrations in order to rob the latter of a casus belli.

If Erdogan is lying, and the US intelligence sources are correct, then Turkey was foolishly tempting this sort of confrontation in the first place, not to mention putting two of its own pilots at lethal risk. Ankara’s furious response might have been planned all along, despite then falling foul of the White House's own sensitive timetable.

You can see why Turkey might want to hurry things along like that. The latest proposal to emerge from yet another Kofi Annan-administered boondoggle in Geneva calls for a transitional government to be appointed in Syria consisting of regime members and opposition figures who are not dedicating to undermining reconciliation. Washington, London and Paris have interpreted this to mean that Bashar al-Assad must not be a part of said transition. Moscow, which came away from Switzerland "delighted" with the language of the deal, insists it means no such thing. The Assad regime and Syrian political and military oppositions, meanwhile, rejected the deal outright. So while the same old story gets dressed up by a credulous news cycle as an advancement in international "consensus", Turkey grows restless.

And why not? It's not motivated not by humanitarian imperative but by national security. It fears further cross-border raids into its territory by regime forces. It sees itself as already intervening by hosting and arming Syrian rebels. And it is absolutely terrified that Assad’s sleeper proxy in Syria, the PKK, will begin a new terrorist assault even as Turkey continues to try and destroy the group's strongholds in southern Turkey and northern Iraq.

We have now reached a stage in the Syria crisis where another NATO ally seeks to lead from behind and is told by the United States that the timing is all wrong.